Some time ago, in an older post, I set up Evolution to connect to Hotmail / Windows Live Mail – but I didn’t get round to doing anything about my Hotmail contacts. It turns out that exporting them from Hotmail and importing them into Evolution was not at all difficult – but the process did require me to have access to Microsoft Outlook to complete it.

Exporting contacts from Hotmail is simple – click Contacts, Options followed by the Exporting Contacts link. Verify your account and then click the Export button:

The export from Hotmail will give you all of your contacts in a file called WLMContacts. Open Microsoft Outlook and Import your contacts – the following instructions apply to Outlook 2003:

Click File then Import and Export.

Select Import from another program or file and then click Next.

Select Comma Separated Values (Windows) and then click Next.

Browse to the location of WLMContacts and select the file, then click the Do not import duplicate items radio button and click Next.

Select Contacts as the destination folder in Outlook and click Next.

Now that we have our contacts in Outlook we need to forward them to an email address that Evolution has access to.

In Outlook click on Contacts and then press Ctrl + A to select all contacts. Click the Actions menu followed by Forward as vCard. Send them to an email address that Evolution has access to.

Now that we have the Outlook side of things done we can switch to Ubuntu. The first thing to do is to create a folder in your Home directory called contacts.

Next Open Evolution and select the email that you sent to yourself from Outlook. Click the Save All button and save the attachments to the contacts folder.

The final step before importing our contacts is to create a single contacts.vcf file from all of the .vcf attachments that we just downloaded from Evolution.

Click Applications, Accessories and then Terminal. Enter the following commands to change directory to contacts and then create a single file of contacts called contacts.vcf:

cd contacts
cat *.vcf > contacts.vcf

Now we are ready to import our Hotmail contacts into Evolution.

Open Evolution and click File, Import and then the Forward button. Click the Import a single file button and then click Forward again:

Click the Filename field and browse to the location of the contacts.vcf file that you created earlier:

Select contacts.vcf and then click the Open button. Click the File type drop-down menu and select vCard (.vcf, .grcd) from the list and then click the Forward button:

When prompted for a location select Personal under On This Computer and then click Forward: